Vier Lichtlein!

A few photos of last year.  It was all blue and white.  This year I will remember christmas time as golden sunlight with a few heavy showers, most of which I missed.  

                                         The window from the balcony
Bandon trees by country mouse

         

                       Quiet evenings painting

Snow outside our house

Advent Advent ein Lichtlein brennt, erst eins, dann zwei, dann drei!

In other words, three candles on the advent wreath (whether you are religious or just like christmassy traditions).

Stage 1: Getting it Together

My life has changed somewhat since having the baby.  I have so much less time now.  I want to get organised so that I still have time to make things.  It is possible that I might even make more of my time than I did before. If I have you, my invisible audience, watching my progress I think I will try harder! And maybe I will inspire someone in their own attempts to make room for creativity.  I want simplicity, order and beauty in my life, that means sorting out my
1. COOKING
2. HOUSE
3. FINANCES
4. PROJECTS
I am not naturally organised in the kitchen and I often don't know what I want to cook or what I need to shop for.  The little mouse is a very good incentive for cooking healthy food.
I don't have all that much stuff but I still need to do a good clear out and find room for the surface clutter.  I would like to get more systematic about de-cluttering so that I can spend more time decorating our little apartment.
On the money front, I believe money is the big metaphor for our times now and getting straight with it will make me wiser.  Like creative blocks, money blocks show us where we need to bring some awareness to our lives.  This is a big important project!
Which brings me to art, creativity, making things, plans, goals and ideas and how to actualize all of these and still have plenty of fun time with the little mouse.

Is there anyone attempting similar moves towards clarity?

                                         behind my house

Toronto

I get a bit sleepy when i put the little one to bed.  I was going to write about my utopian vision for the world.  Maybe I will have a good nights sleep before I tackle that one.  I also want to introduce myself properly soon.

 I feel like this process began in 2008 when Astrid and I went travelling before my wedding.  When I read other people's blogs I think about Toronto.  I have always been drawn to writing diaries but have some mental blocks about them.  When I was young I wrote them, but seemed to feel I needed to write down everything I ate, or I might forget the precious memories.  Later on I swept all sentimentality aside and said to hell with memories, we live in the now!  When we travelled in Africa I wrote letters to my mother, that way I had to stick to the point.  Maybe with this blog I can find a balance.

So here are a few photos of Toronto.  In October 2009 we flew to Toronto for the first bit of our world tour.  And beauty of blogging is: I can post pictures of what I ate!  Yay!

No. 1s and Michael D. Higgins

I celebrated 11 minutes past 11 on the 11/11/11 on the couch with my number 1 girl who was born on the 11/1/11. Then Astrid and I had the elevensiest elevensies ever and watched Michael D. Higgins being inaugurated.  It felt like a new beginning, really and truly.  At the same time it felt like a connection to all the good things of the past was reestablished.  An artist I know said to me that it made her feel like she was allowed to be an artist again, without art being a commercial venture.  One commentator talked about how the language of economics was basically meaningless.  Michael D. will make the words mean what they say again.  I am so relieved that a different interpretation of the world has been re-discovered, having woken up from our / silly season/ celtic tiger.  Heaven and hell can both be found on this earth and I think poetry is a way to get your head around it!  Well now its 12.22 am, on the 12/11/2011, that's pretty auspicious too I think.

Art.

Art.
This blog is about art.  It is about our art and your art, how to make it, understand it and live it.  We want to share what we have created and that which we admire.  We want to talk about ideas, pass on practical skills and have a place in which we can actively worship creativity and imagination.  


In his Introduction to 'In the Time of Shaking: Irish Artists for Amnesty International', Ciaran Benson, (Professor of Psychology in UCD and Art Critic) talks about art as being based on the human capacity for sharing.  He says that 'art is our most ancient technology for vividly sharing meanings'. When the work of art is done it is "nothing less than a transformation of some part of self's relation to the world, some reconfiguration of feeling which becomes available for memory, and is then integrated as a valued element into the constantly reconfigured stories that are our lives, and those of our communities."


I never knew what to make of the idea of art, let alone what to make of what I was doing.  I felt uncomfortable about my urge to draw something and then show it to someone else and say 'look at these funky lines'.  I have never been able to explain what I do.      Well, according to Dr. Benson I am totally normal.  Human beings from very early on have had the ability to share attention.  This means that when I point at something and you look at it this is a very complex ability and perhaps the foundation of human cultures and art. 


In a developmental context, we can see how this works when parents direct their child's attention to particular aspects of their world and show the child how it should attend to these parts of their world.  They tell it what is important and how it can feel about it.  Culture and art do this for society. When people say 'look at this!' or 'I like this' they influence how our individual and collective stories are shaped and shape us. Let me quote one more time "good art brings great inventiveness to the ways in which it attends to the subtleties of individual and social consciousness and to their objects of attention.  This creativity extends to the ways that it uses media of all kinds to embody shared meaning and to constitute new ones.  It is driven by an endless curiosity about the ways in which human beings create their lives."  


Thank you Ciaran Benson for this way of understanding art. I like it!